PSA: check your governor cable sheaves before they fail at 30 floors

Last month in a 12-stop Otis in downtown Austin, a frayed governor cable caught and snapped the sheave housing right at the 8th floor mark. Has anyone else seen these start to corrode way faster than the manuals say?

3 comments

3 Comments

lucasw8221d ago

Whoa, yeah. Had a sheave crack last winter out of nowhere.

drew_bennett2420d ago

@lucasw82 nailed it. That 8th floor crack is scary, I saw one split clean in half on a 20 year old unit last spring.

viola_ward17d ago

Wait, are we sure it was the sheave housing that cracked and not just the bearing bracket? I've seen a bunch of these Otis units where the bracket itself fails way before the sheave housing does, especially on those older models from the early 2000s. The sheave itself is usually pretty solid unless it's been sitting in water or something wild like that lol. The real issue I keep running into is the governor cables getting dry and starting to fray from the inside out, not from the outside in like people think. If the cable snapped at 8 floors, it was probably already toast for a while and nobody caught it during a routine inspection. Just double check which part actually broke next time, saves a lot of headaches.